Welcome back to AL-MONITOR Istanbul.

This week is dedicated to the young and the young at heart. We start with the ever-iconoclastic Yoko Ono, 93, still asking visitors to crawl through doors and lose themselves in mazes, and end with a UNFPA report on what young people actually want from life and what stands in their way. In between: a chef summoned from his own restaurant to feed NATO leaders, a late discovery of a Turkish novelist, and a temple that spent 113 years under the wrong name.

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Nazlan (@NazlanEr on X)

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1. Leading the week: Doors and unpredictability

“Arising,” from “Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure” at Sakip Sabanci Museum. (Courtesy of SSM)

Sakip Sabanci Museum has never hosted anything quite like “Yoko Ono: Insound and Instructure,” and neither, frankly, has Turkey. At 93, Ono remains stubbornly resistant to being filed away as “the woman who broke up the Beatles,” a myth museum director Ahu Antmen is visibly tired of correcting. The show, organized with MUSAC in Leon, Spain, and curated with Ono’s own studio, gathers 67 works across seven decades, spilling out of the galleries and into the garden of the Bosphorus-facing Atli Kosk.

The premise is simple and slightly terrifying: Visitors crawl through a set of “En-trance” doors — one low and rising, one that narrows until you’re on your knees. There’s a chess set that’s entirely white, no black pieces anywhere, playable only “as long as you remember where all your pieces are,” per Ono’s own wall text — a fairly on-brand metaphor for adulthood. Elsewhere, “My Mother Is Beautiful” invites visitors to write down whatever comes to mind about their mothers and pin it to the wall, an exercise that many of us end up crying through.

The exhibition draws heavily on “Grapefruit,” Ono’s 1964 book of instruction pieces, poetry that asks the reader to complete the work in their own head, decades before “participatory........

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